A high school student says he was wrongly accused of calling in a bomb threat in part because school officials hadn't adjusted their clocks for daylight-saving time.
Cody Webb, 15, called a school district hot line to listen to a recorded message about school delays at 3:12 a.m. ET on March 11, according to his cell phone records.
Hempfield Area School District officials thought someone with a blocked phone number called in a bomb threat just five minutes later, but they were an hour off because their system hadn't adjusted for the time change that weekend, Webb's attorney Tim Andrews said.
Webb refused to confess and spent 12 days in a juvenile detention center.
"I wasn't going to admit to something I didn't do," Webb told the Tribune-Review of Greensburg for a story Wednesday. "Me and God know I didn't do it."
A judge released him when a state trooper failed to show up at a hearing, then dismissed the charges March 27.
"The district attorney subpoenaed the cell phone records, and it didn't take more than a minute to see the times didn't match," Andrews said.
District solicitor Dennis Slyman said police investigating the bomb threat never asked school officials about when the clocks were reset.
"Whatever they did was with their own investigation and outside the auspices of the school district," Slyman said.
Trooper Jeanne Martin, a state police spokeswoman, did not immediately return a call for comment Wednesday. Martin told the Tribune-Review that the time change was an issue in the charges being dropped and that the bomb threat investigation was continuing.
Andrews said the boy's family is considering a lawsuit against the school district or police for false arrest.